Vista Service Pack 1 is now finished. The Vista team announced on their blog that they now have released SP1 to manufacturing (RTM). They also say that:

"...we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility."

and

"...copying or moving files around your PC, your home network or your corporate network should now be much faster -- up to 50% faster in some scenarios (according to our internal tests)."

This has annoyed me a lot on my HP:

"In addition, on many kinds of hardware, resuming a Windows Vista-based PC from sleep is faster on Service Pack 1."

So when and where can I download? It will be available trough Windows Update in mid March (and auto download in mid April if you have this enabled). So why not today? During beta testing some issues was found related to some device drivers "that did not follow our guidelines for driver installation". So the next month will be used to:

"...giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers." 

If  you don't want Vista to update itself to SP1 when it's available, check out my previous post on how to block the update.